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You've heard the expression "never bring a knife to a gunfight," right? In the sprawling fantasy world of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the applicable axiom would be something like "never bring a sword to a dragonfight."

Dragons play a big part in this, the fifth full-length installment in the sprawling role-playing game series that began way back in the distant mists of 1994 with The Elder Scrolls: Arena.

Taking place 200 years after the events of 2006's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, it's set in the mountainous northern province Skyrim, which is being menaced by civil war and a newly awakened race of dragons, the cohorts of an ancient god of destruction who is coming back to kick the world's collective butt.

As the last member of a line of dragon hunters chosen to protect the realm, your ultimate goal is to confront the god of destruction and somehow establish some sort of peace in Skyrim. Y'know, no big deal.

Of course, dragons are a hell of a lot sexier than politics. And fiercer, too. I learned this the hard way the first time I encountered one of the game's flying reptiles in the wilderness, as it attacked my character (a wood elf with a penchant for destructive magic and archery-based assassination) and his follower, a badass female warrior.

But while you don't bring a sword to a dragonfight - at least, unless it's a heavily enchanted sword capable of dealing massive amounts of damage - you can bring a pair of giants. My first wild dragon encounter ended with the frost-breathing lizard mostly shrugging off the plink-plink of my steel arrows, but getting its scaly head bashed in by the nearby giants it made the mistake of getting tangled up with.

And that, in the tiniest sliver of an example, is Skyrim: a huge world that reacts not only to your actions, but also to its own rhythms and rules and randomness.

Like all of Bethesda's role-playing games, Skyrim is enormous and can consume more than 100 hours of play time for those who are willing to pursue every side quest, speak to every resident of the world and experiment with alchemy and weapon smithing and cooking and the other optional activities in the game.

As of this writing I'm "only" a dozen or two hours in, barely enough to scratch the surface of a sprawling world, and thus this is more a review of the first chunk of Skyrim than the game as a whole. It's an intriguing place, though, helped immensely by the improvements developer Bethesda has made to the game's visuals and the streamlining of its various character management systems.

Skyrim does have problems, though. The pacing is all over the map, and it's a slow, slow burn before things really get interesting. Talking to other characters sometimes requires extreme patience as they prattle on interminably. And as with every other game in this series, the sheer number of variables leads to lots of random glitches and bugs, though none seem especially malign.

It would be generous to call Skyrim an accessible game, but it will surely appeal to fans who are willing to embrace the major changes, ignore the minor glitches and lose themselves in this world.

Bottomline: You don't dip your toes into a game like Skyrim; you take several deep breaths, jump in and let yourself be immersed for weeks on end.